Perhaps less attention has been paid to the
figures published a couple of days later on material deprivation (as measured
by Eurostat’s SILC
survey) in 2011. No surprise really, as ‘poverty’ is a word that makes
headlines while ‘material deprivation’ is hard to translate and sounds rather
technical.

In fact it’s the other way around; poverty
is measured using a technical and rather arbitrary definition, while material
deprivation is measured by individuals’ responses to simple questions such as
‘can you afford to buy meat twice a week/go on holiday/keep your house warm?’ If
journos only realised this, this far more dramatic dataset would be their
number one hunting ground. (For a further discussion, by a Marxist no less, see
here).

Anyway, the new figures suggest that
material deprivation in Greece went up in 2011, regardless of what dimension of
deprivation is considered. The ones I’ve
been looking at the longest are:

I started looking at the data one year ago in
response to persistent reports of Greek children fainting at school due to
malnutrition. While the first and most
famous of these reports was an over-generalisation in lieu of lobbying by
the Greek teachers’ union, many have followed and it’s safe to say that malnutrition
is a fact
of life for many of my compatriots, many of those with children. Besides,
by the time the children in a
household are having to go without food, one can be certain the adults have already
been going without for a while.

The tables below demonstrate the percentage
of households dealing with each of the above facets of material deprivation.
Worst off as you might have guessed are single parent families, families with
more than two children, and people living on their own, especially older people.

To return to the issue of food poverty, just under
one in nine households with children are finding it hard to feed properly,
twice as many as in 2007 and the highest percentage since this question was
introduced in 2003. I say ‘feed properly’ because it's not 100% clear what falls under not being able to afford a 'vegetarian equivalent' twice a week. As @irategreek pointed out to me over Twitter, this is interpreted by humanitarian aid agencies as including pulses. In a Greek context, not being able to afford these twice a week is really at the margins of extreme poverty. It’s still not the Argentine 6 peso diet, but
a good measure of what most people would think of as
really struggling to get by.

Using food deprivation as the main
indicator, it turns out that 2005 was when the Greeks lived best, a finding
that matches my estimates elsewhere.
In fact, the drop in food poverty levels in the immediate aftermath of Euro
adoption (and despite the reports and reality of persistent inflation) was
spectacular.

By way of a caveat I should say that
respondents to such surveys may be embarrassed to tell researchers that they’re
not able to afford certain things, especially if they have children, so the SILC
estimates are almost certainly under-estimates. Still, large surveys such as SILC
ask a whole bunch of questions and are not at all focused on poverty indicators,
so people going hungry will not necessarily tend to opt out altogether.
Moreover, I think it’s safe to assume that the tendency to lie about living in
poverty is not greater in Greece than elsewhere and has not become greater over
time (in fact, in hard times people may be more willing to discuss such
problems openly).

Anyway, it turns out Estonia, Malta and the
Czech Republic are countries with similar levels of food poverty as Greece’s among
households with dependent children, and this grouping holds when it comes to
large families with children. When it
comes to single parents, on the other hand, we’re stuck somewhere between
Poland and Romania.

Remember, the Czech Republic is, to me, the
best-case scenario of where Greece will end up. The worst case is Latvia,
where 29.6% of households with dependent children live in food poverty – almost
three times as many as in Greece.

Now hunger is one area where libertarians
are challenged strongly by other creeds: presumably libertarians are OK with
this and think we should allow people – worse, children!- to go hungry.

My answer is (as Greek readers will know
already) ‘no’, but for a given value of ‘we’. Using the word ‘we’ to denote
the State is, after all, a sly rhetorical tactic that has gradually injected
our discourse with statism. ‘We’, as in society, must not allow people to go
hungry, least of all children. The State could have a role in protecting life
and property, countering negative externalities and subsidising positive ones (health,
education, public infrastructures) but beyond that point it should leave poverty
to the real ‘we.’

Not that Greece’s anti-poverty policies
were ever good to begin with. According to the latest data, and the older data too,
Greece’s welfare state has for years been the worst in the OECD at tackling
poverty – in terms of how much it manages to reduce the risk of poverty per
Euro spent.But the latest study is much more
damning of the project throughout Europe: it takes the more ‘efficient’ EU
countries on average 5 times their per capita GDP per year to lift or keep a
single person out of poverty, and this multiple is on the rise.

This is amazing
as it’s many times over the sustained income that would be required for the
same person to no longer be poor. The countries making the most out of their
anti-poverty money are, amazingly, Hungary; Slovakia; Bulgaria; Czech Republic;
and Poland.

There’s a simple reason for this. The
welfare state may focus its planning on poor people, but its intermediate
output almost always tends to be middle-class jobs ‘managing’ the poverty agenda in a self-serving manner. And since the middle class is better at lobbying than the poor, they also manage to skim many of the system's transfers for themselves.
All of this is a simple, well
known feature of bureaucracies everywhere; we just happen to have become
better at it. It’s also a constant refrain in the TPA’s non-job
of the week column, a Greek equivalent of which would make the world a
better and funnier place – if any public sector job ever came with a job
description (see my Bank of Greece example here).
But there is a more insidious side to the broken safety net. As this excellent World Bank Study demonstrates. vote buying tactics are directly related to under-investment in public services that benefit the poor. OK, it's set in the Philippines, but I'd say it applies to Greece just as well.

If you want to know more about the amazing SILC survey, check out this gem I've got for you, right from the vaults of the Eurocracy. Also, if you'd like to know more about how SILC-measured material poverty matches other poverty estimates, Eurostat has prepared a very interesting overview here.

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LOL GREECE is a non-revenue blog intended as evidence-based and occasionally satirical commentary on the state of the Greek economy. The author, Emmanuel (Manos) Schizas, holds both Greek and British citizenship and is a permanent resident of the United Kingdom, where he is employed and duly taxed. The rest of his family (both parents and one brother) live in Athens.

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